


No Future

by Tcharlatan



Series: Rude [3]
Category: Dir en grey
Genre: Angst, Band Fic, Discussion of Abortion, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff and Angst, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, POV First Person, Past Relationship(s), Scars, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-08
Updated: 2012-12-08
Packaged: 2017-11-20 14:59:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/586632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tcharlatan/pseuds/Tcharlatan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A new act of stage play leads Die to question Kyo about his past, and what he learns is devastating in ways he could never have imagined.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Future

**Author's Note:**

> This is a work of pure fiction. I do not personally know any of the members of Dir en grey, and do not profit from this work.
> 
> CAUTION: This fic does contain fairly sensitive subject matter, so please proceed at your own discretion.

My body sinks, warm and heavy and loose with absolute exhaustion, into the couch, and I think that I might melt into it as worn out cushions swallow me. But even as my physical form sinks, my mind and my soul are flying free into an open sky, and I wonder if this is what enlightenment feels like. I’m not _happy_ , because to be happy requires the possibility of unhappiness, and I lack that possibility entirely; no, there is no light because there is no darkness, and so I lose myself into pure, serene grey. A perfect mental, emotional, and spiritual _void_. It’s a nice sort of quietness after the frenzied rollercoaster the day has been up until now.

Today started… well, not _normally_ , because I don’t think very much of my life really meets the criteria for normalcy, but in a manner to which I am very happily accustomed. I don’t know for sure what woke me up; it could have been my pillow shifting, or a moan only partially muffled, or maybe even the tickle of something hot and salty dripping onto my nose. Whatever it was, I just barely had time to register the blur of a frantically-pumping hand over dark red flesh and close my eyes again before Die was shooting his load all over my face. He’d snuck into my hotel room to wake me up in his own way, before my alarm clock could go off and sour my mood for the morning. It may seem strange, but that vulgar wake-up got me off to a wonderful start.

Die told me once – a couple years back, when we first started sleeping together – that he’d spent so long fantasizing, he’d accumulated a massive build-up of wicked, obscene things he wanted to do with and to me. He said his constant need to drag me into bizarre fetish situations is just his way of bleeding off years of pressure, and that he just can’t really help but indulge his whims now that we’re together. Sure, it means his brain is typically a meter south of where it probably should be, but it also has a way of making me feel attractive. _Wanted._ It’s a nice feeling to start the day to. We showered together and he fucked me, deep and slow against the tile wall, whispering sweet, filthy nothings into my ear. He kept one hand clamped over my mouth to keep me from screaming our sins to the entire hotel, then that selfsame hand washed my hair for me so I could doze a little leaning against his chest afterwards.

Then it was time to go, and the warm affection that had colored my morning faded and flared into the quiet, shivery anticipation that always comes before a live show. We took a van to the venue, and filed down the halls with nothing but the sound of our various belts and wallet chains jingling passing between us. We got ready, took our turns with hair and make-up, went through soundcheck after soundcheck after soundcheck under the watchful eyes of crew and the empty auditorium’s lingering ghosts. Toshiya dicked around on his phone, Shinya drummed endlessly at his knees. Die went through his usual rounds of stretching, Kaoru pretended to be too cool to be nervous. I stood in front of a mirror and scratched 'NO FUTURE' in English into my chest with a razor blade. Someone took a picture while I did it. We’ve all done this a thousand times, and plan to do it a thousand more, but I’m sure I’m not the only one whose heart is damn-near _vibrating_ with excitement in the hours leading up to every concert.

Then we were in our circle, hands joined at the center, and Kaoru was giving our final rallying speech before leading us into our usual battlecry, and it was time to perform.

More and more lately, I’ve found myself drifting away from the old stage games; the fake blood, the fake vomit, the fake vulgarism. It never felt like enough… like I was cheapening myself or my reality somehow. But tonight, with my own blood dripping down my chest as my own words rip their way out of my throat, it was like my heart and soul were spilling out over the crowd and touching every last person there. And through that connection, I gave them _everything_. All my pain and ecstasy, all my love and hate, all the truth in all the lies; I ripped myself open and hemorrhaged everything that had ever festered inside of me. And in return, they threw their hands into the air to catch my spirit in their hands and sang with me, intertwining their essences with mine if only for those few moments, their touch burning away my rot. I was a god brought to my knees in supplication to these thousands of mortals, and it was – as it always is – the most and least human I have ever felt. The flashing lights, the screaming voices, the tangible thrill and power rolling off of my bandmates, it all coiled up behind and around me to carry me up into the tranquil grey abyss… and here I float… untouched… untouchable.

A sudden light assaults my eyelids and I drift down from my reverie, slitting my eyes open to regard the disturbance. I find Die crouching in front of me, holding up the front of the towel I’d had draped over my head to peek at me underneath. Seeing that I’m awake, he folds the front edge of the cloth on the crown of my skull to keep it out of the way, leaving his hands free to rest on either side of my waist. His touch feels too-hot on my sweaty skin, but I don’t mind. I don’t mind anything right now.

“Hey,” he says softly.

“Hey.” My voice is pretty rough, but at least it isn’t completely shot.

“…”One of his hands moves up slowly, ghosting just under the words I carved into my chest, and he gives me a smile that registers as entirely uneasy. “So… this is new.”

He shifts his weight a little, and it occurs to me that he seems much… _quieter_ somehow than he usually is just after a show; his face a little more solemn and his eyes a little darker. I look down at myself, at his hand trying so hard to be gentle around a wound I inflicted on myself, and try to figure out why this – of all the things I’ve done to myself, onstage and off – would bother him. I think under normal circumstances, I would be more worried about his strange mood, but in my current state, I only really feel mild curiosity. It’s like I’m watching him from a distance; wrapped in a cottony cloud of anesthetized bliss that obscures and muffles him from me.

“Yeah.”

“You, um… you know what this says, right? What it means?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“…Do you… I mean… you don’t believe it… do you?”

I look back at him, and I’m slightly jarred by how hurt he looks. This is all entirely unlike him, and I don’t really understand what’s going on between us right now. “What do you mean?”

“That you… us… I mean the band and… you and I…?” He shakes his head, frowning. “Kyo… baby… Do you really think you have no future?”

Ohhh… I see what’s happening here. He’s misunderstood the meaning behind the carving, and he’s hurt because he thinks I don’t consider our band or our relationship to be a future. Although, now that I think about it, what else could he think? It’s not like I ever told him the story behind these words. Normally I keep it to myself, if only because I know that dredging up those memories fully would reduce me to a hysterical mess of shrieking and sobbing. Or maybe I’m afraid to be judged by him… afraid for him to know what I almost did, and how close all of this came to never happening. But now… right now I’m safe in my grey haze, so it seems all too easy to show him the wound I’ve kept festering all these years.

“Ne, Die… do you remember when I was engaged?”

He blinks and sits back a little, looking surprised. “Huh?”

“Back when the band was first getting together, I got engaged. You remember?”

“Um… yeah… to Takara?” He’s confused.

I nod and let my head cock to one side a bit, letting my eyes lose focus as I sink into the memory. “You guys all said you were happy for me, but I knew you all thought I was crazy. Kara and I had only been together for a few months, and we didn’t even get along all that well… but I still scrapped together every last yen I could find, and borrowed from you guys and my parents to get her a ring.” I laugh, and it sounds a little hollow in my own ears. “Even then, it was a piece of shit… but I went through with it anyways… and she said yes.”

“I remember…” he murmurs, brows still knitted together.

“I was determined to make it work. I was _going_ to love her and she was _going_ to love me, and we were going to be happy together for the rest of our lives. It seems so stupid now… even Shinya was worried, told me that I was going too fast and that I should hold off a little longer until I was sure. What I never told anyone… was that I proposed to Takara when I did because we found out she was pregnant.”

His eyes go wide and he jerks a bit, startled. “She-… _what?_ ”

I feel my mouth pull into a wry smile. “She had an ear infection, and the doctor gave her antibiotics. Turns out they completely fuck up birth control pills.”

His mouth just hangs open and he stares at me in utter disbelief.

“She was only about six weeks along… too soon to know what it was, but I knew – I just _knew_ – that it was going to be a little girl. My little princess…” The thought still makes me warm, even now, and all the irony bleeds out of my smile. “And you know… I was going to quit the band for her. For _them_. I was going to get my high school equivalency diploma and get a real job – two jobs, three, it didn’t matter – whatever it took so that I could give my _wife_ and my _daughter_ the best life I possibly could.” I look down at his hand, still resting on my chest. “I was going to give up every last dream I’d ever had about making music, and I wasn’t even sad about it. I was just so damn excited to be a father… it was all I could think about, all that mattered to me anymore, and I was happier than I think I’ve ever been in my life.

“For two weeks, I spent every minute I had to spare hunting for a better job and filing for financial aid to a night school to get my diploma. I had just gotten a call back from some grocery store that needed a new register attendant, and I was going to tell you guys that night that I was leaving… that I was going to start a family…”

This is where I would normally start to break down, and even now I can feel a dull ache start to build in my heart as my clouded mind takes on a stormier hue. It feels like an infection; a hot, throbbing pain hiding deep under the surface, and I wonder if fully opening it up like this – not in vague, illusory song lyrics, but forthright to the man who knows me better than anyone else – after so long will lance it for good; bleed out the last lingering traces of putrefaction. I don’t even know if I want it to, honestly. I’ve held onto this pain so long, I don’t know who I’d be without it… but I suppose there’s nothing for it now.

“…You… you were going to…?” Die sounds lost now. Scared, which I suppose is fair, given that he’s only just now finding out how damn close I came to destroying everything we have now before we even got to taste it.

“She was so smart, you know? Before we found out she was pregnant, she had been planning to go to school to be a cardiologist. And for some reason, I thought that she was just as happy to let go of her dreams for our family as I was… give up becoming a _doctor_ , Die. How stupid I was then…” I sigh and shake my head at my own naiveté. “She gave me back the ring that day. She said that we had fun and all, but that to marry me… to be my wife, to be the mother of my child… she said it was no future. That _I_ was no future. And that was it; she packed her things, kissed my cheek, and I never saw her again after that.”

He wraps his hands around my arms for support, looking shell-shocked. “…Kyo… I never-… I’m so sorry, I-…” He tries to smile again, and this one is almost sadder than the first, grasping for a ray of hope. “Do… do you know where they are now? Maybe we could track them down and you could go see your daughter? I mean… you should have visitation rights, even if you guys never got married, right?”

I smile at the thought, because it’s a nice fantasy if nothing else. “Die… I don’t have a daughter.”

“What? But you said-”

“Takara had an abortion.”

The sound he makes, and the look on his face… I may as well have punched him in the stomach.

I close my eyes, leaning my head back into the couch cushions. “I dreamt about her a few times, you know? That’s how I knew she was going to be a girl; I saw her, held her in my arms and played with her. She was _beautiful_. My little girl… perfect and beautiful. I was going to _sing_ with her. I was going to write her a thousand songs with a thousand happy endings, and I was going to protect her from everything ugly and hurtful in this world so that she would never stop smiling at me the way she smiled at me in my dreams. She was hardly more than a heartbeat, and I loved her with absolutely all of my soul, swore that I would do _anything_ for her.”

For just a moment, if I reach deep enough into the memory, I can almost see her again… her big brown eyes upturned into sparkling crescents… feathery black eyelashes kissing round, rosy cheeks… a tiny little button nose over a tiny little mouth. I can hear her bird-song voice, laughing and squealing and calling me ‘Daddy’… I lift my hand and I can feel her tiny fingers pressing against my palm, so soft and fragile and warm. Then it’s all gone again, vanishing into the darkness of my mind and I sigh, dropping my arm. Now I almost wish that I hadn’t bled myself emotionally dry already tonight, just so I could hurt properly for her.

“I couldn’t even get her a proper grave, since I never learned her name, and aborted babies are medical waste, not remains. ‘No Future’ isn’t what I have. It’s what I _am;_ what I passed on to my daughter so that she never got to live. This is my label.”

There’s a long, empty silence in the wake of my confession, and I realize after a moment that the hands wrapped around my arms are shaking, and gripping onto me with almost-painful force. I lift my head and see something I’ve never seen before, never even imagined I would see. Die is… _crying._ It doesn’t even look like he knows he’s doing it; he’s still staring at me, and his mouth is still hanging open in shock, but tears are streaming down his cheeks. It’s utterly surreal, and I reach up one hand to wipe the side of his face.

“Die?”

For a moment, it looks like he wants to say something, but before anything can come out, he has his face hidden against my stomach. He’s silent, but his shoulders are shaking and his breathing is erratic, so I know he’s still crying. I’m baffled by it until I realize that he’s crying for me, _hurting_ for me and my losses even when they could be considered his gains, and for some reason, even though I know I shouldn’t be, I’m deeply grateful for it. Later, when I come back down from my high, I’ll pull these memories back out and self-flagellate with them, but for now, I wrap my arms around my Die and hold him as close to myself as I possibly can, letting him be my broken heart.

 

~*~

 

Where is it, where _is_ it?! I know I left my notepad in here somewhere and if I don’t find it soon I’m going to lose my damn train of thought and I’ll never get it back. I don’t know if this is going to be a song or just a poem, but either way it’s perfect in my mind and I want to capture it just the way it is right now. On the bedside table? No. Under the pillows? No. _In_ the bedside table? On the dresser? Sock drawer?! …No, no, no, damn it all! The bedroom is pretty thoroughly trashed, and I’m still empty-handed and unreasonably frustrated… and now I can’t even be sure that I _did_ leave it in here. I hate losing things. Really, it has to be somewhere else, because the only horizontal surface left is the windowsill, and I draw back the curtain halfheartedly, certain it will prove just as fruitless.

“Ha!”

Battered black faux-leather flashes dully and I snatch it up, sitting on the foot of the bed as I yank the pencil out of its holding place and flip through to the next blank page. Graphite hits paper and I scratch out… nothing. It was… something about centipedes, or… a faded photograph…? Ah, hell. I lost it.

A less-than-attractive groan of frustration escapes me and I flop back onto the bed, letting the pad and pencil fall to the floor. “Goddamn it.”

I take a deep breath, hold it for as long as I can, then let it out in a slow gust, letting my frustration bleed out with it. It’s not the first time the exact same thing has happened, and it sure as hell won’t be the last, so I can’t let myself linger on it. As I take in another deep breath, I hear the front door open, and I hold it until I hear it close again and careful footsteps start down the hall. This one comes out more as a sigh, and I put one arm over my face. Die’s changed a lot since we got back from the tour; it’s like he’s always walking on eggshells around me, and not just with his gait. It’s driving me crazy.

The whole week, he’s so much… quieter, I guess – _softer_ – when he speaks to me, when he touches me, and I wouldn’t mind that in itself, except he’s doing both way less often than he used to, and he has this expression on his face every time he looks at me that I just can’t understand. Like he’s feeling guilty about something. But that doesn’t make any sense; it started after I told him how things ended with my first fiancée, and he has no reason to feel _guilty_ about anything that happened with her. Though it’s better than it could have been, I suppose… one of my greatest fears has always been to be _pitied_ by people who I respect, and I have immense respect for all of my bandmates. If anything, _I_ should be guilty; I’m the one that almost ditched the band – and him – for a marriage that had no hope of succeeding. But he doesn’t seem upset with me at all.

“Hey… Baby? Are you awake?”

Oh, he’s actually initiating contact today. Well, that’s progress, I guess. “Yeah. What’s up?”

“I, um… I wanted-… well-… umm…”

His lack of nerve around me has been deeply unsettling. Die – _my_ Die – does _not_ stutter or fumble for words. I move my arm and push myself back to sitting to look at him. He doesn’t have that guilty look today, which is a deep reassurance, but he looks kind of frustrated and nervous, and he’s hiding something behind his back. I’m really glad we’re moving past whatever’s been bothering him all week, but I don’t know how to deal with this mood swing any better than I did the last one.

“Die? Are you okay? You’ve been really weird lately…”

He shakes his head and just starts talking, too fast and kind of jolting, like he planned out what he was going to say and he wants to blow through the script as quickly as possible. “Kyo, I can’t give you back what Takara took. And I… I don’t even think I _would_ if I could-” There’s a flash of that guilt again, but he shakes it away quickly. “-because if she hadn’t left you, _I_ would never have gotten a chance to be with you, and I know I’m a selfish bastard but I can’t _choose_ to not have you, you know? I’m sorry, but I can’t, even if it meant giving you back what you lost. Anyways, I can’t give it all back, and I can’t replace it or… or offer you that kind of family, but I… I mean…”

He screws his face up, obviously biting whatever bullet he needs to move on, and thrusts something out to me. I raise an eyebrow at him, questioning, but he won’t look at me, so I look down at whatever’s got him riled up. It’s a picture frame, and when I take it to look at the photo inside properly, I’m not really sure what to make of it. It seems pretty generic; just a smiling baby on a white background, wearing a pink shirt and an elastic lace band around its head. It probably was the default picture for the frame, which itself is just plain black wood. I look back up at Die, more confused now than I was when he first came in.

His voice drops to a sharp whisper, like he thinks what he’s about to say is going to either hurt me or scare me off. “I… sent in pictures of us… you and I, how we are now and how we were when we were kids… to one of those places that uses computers to guess what two people’s kids would look like.”

My breath catches in my throat and my eyes snap back down to the picture again. Almond-shaped eyes that narrow to an unusually sharp, exotic point on the outside edge. _Die’s_ eyes. A small, straight nose that rounds out into a button at the end. _My_ nose. The chubby cheeks Die had as a baby, my arched eyebrows, his Cupid’s-bow mouth, my oval ears. There’s a little red guitar stitched into the front of her shirt, and a tiny silk lotus attached to the front of her headband. I feel the bed dip to one side as he settles next to me, one leg next to mine and the other behind me as he wraps himself entirely around me, but I can’t look away from the picture of… of _our_ baby.

“I can’t give you everything you want… but if I could, I would,” he sighs, butting his forehead against my temple. “You can write a thousand songs with a thousand sad endings, I’ll play with you for every one of them, because… well, you’re _my_ future.”

I think I can feel tears on my cheeks, but I really can’t say for sure, because all I can do is stare at the precious gift in my hands and run shaking fingers over the chubby cheeks of _our_ little girl. Die tells me he loves me often enough, and I’ve long since learned to trust and accept it, but this… this is so much more than that. This is a _family._ This is the marriage that isn’t legal and the baby that’s biologically impossible and the promise of wanting forever that he can’t seem to voice explicitly because it’s kind of a daunting prospect, but is offering in his own way. It hurts like hell, but it almost feels like a healing sort of ache.

“Die…”

“Please don’t freak out.”

I can’t help but laugh a little and lean back against him, feeling him relax around me. “I’m not, I’m just kind of-… she’s _beautiful_.”

He smiles against my neck and tightens his grip on me, and for a long time, we just sit together and stare at the picture. I know that I’ll never stop hurting for the daughter I almost had and lost, but maybe… maybe I can let the wound stop bleeding and scar over? Stop punishing myself with her memory and let her fragile spirit move on to find its peace… accept what I’ve lost so I can embrace what I’ve been given instead? It feels weird, after holding onto it all for so long, but the thought of being Die’s future – and of him being mine – makes me oddly warm.

Actually, there _is_ a weird heat, kind of by my hip… seriously?

“Die?”

“Yeah?”

“Your boner is kind of spoiling the moment. What are you all excited about?”

He offers me a sheepish grin and splays one hand over my stomach. “I was imagining you knocked up. All glowing and bitchy and fat with the fruit of _my_ seed…”

I sigh, exasperated, but I know I’m smiling. My Die is back to his usual self, it seems.

“Why would I be the pregnant one?”

“Cause you have the girliest figure.”

“Excuse me?!”

“Baby, name _one_ man with an ass like yours. I’m all flat. Plus you’d look sexier with a big, swollen stomach and your belly button sticking out… mmm…”

“…”

“Ahh, and I bet you’d have _amazing_ tits!”

My future, indeed.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> This is easily the least-sexy installment of the Rude series to date, but somehow, when the idea for it came up (inspired by pictures of Kyo at a signing, smiling at a little girl someone had brought along), I could only imagine it in this universe.  
> Please note that this in no way represents my opinion on abortion or those that seek it, for whatever reason. It's simply my interpretation of how the characters might experience that particular situation.


End file.
